


Sunshine and Sunset

by duchessofthemoonbase



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: DamereyDaily2020, F/M, Force Ghost(s), Old Age, but I don't care i'm just here to make you feel things, yes i know only jedi can be force ghosts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-08
Updated: 2020-01-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:29:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22177084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duchessofthemoonbase/pseuds/duchessofthemoonbase
Summary: “Will you please tell me a story about Grandpa Poe? Pleaseeee.” Leia begs, smiling up at Rey. “Pleaseeeee…”“Of course I will,” Rey says, smiling down at her granddaughter. She’s sitting in her favorite rocking chair outside of their house on Yavin, looking out over the koyo fields. “What would you like to know?”
Relationships: Poe Dameron/Rey
Comments: 27
Kudos: 53
Collections: Damerey Daily 2020





	Sunshine and Sunset

**Author's Note:**

> For the DamereyDaily2020 Day 8 Prompt from Ragtime:
> 
> "What’s that? In the distance? Such a ghostly glow"

“Will you _please_ tell me a story about Grandpa Poe? _Pleaseeee.”_ Leia begs, smiling up at Rey. “ _Pleaseeeee…”_

“Leia!” Her mother snaps, as Shara whispers quietly to Leia in a voice she thinks Rey can’t hear. “You’ll only upset her.” 

Her lovely eldest daughter, always trying to protect her, never quite learning that Rey would always be one step ahead.

“Please?” Leia whispers so her mother can’t hear. She looks up at Rey, a messy head of dark curls and a charming little smirk on her face.

Two things she’s never been able to resist.

“Of course I will,” Rey says, smiling down at her granddaughter. She’s sitting in her favorite rocking chair outside of their house on Yavin, looking out over the koyo fields. “What would you like to know?”

“I don’t know,” Leia says, leaning her head on Rey’s knee. She’s braiding wildflowers absentmindedly in her tiny hands. She’s small for a ten year old, but every bit as tough as her namesake was. “Something not about piloting.”

“Not about piloting? But you and Temmin always want to hear about piloting.”

Leia looks at her shyly. “I know, but I never got to meet Grandpa Poe. What was he like? Just…you know…when he lived here in this house? When it was just you and him and mom when she was little."

“Hmm…” Rey says, a soft smile on her face. “I never know where to begin with that man, you know. He was brave, and charming, and handsome, and all those things they say about him in the history books. He really was. But mostly he was full of love. He felt things and believed in things harder and stronger than anyone I’ve ever met.”

“Did you know when you met him that you were going to marry him?”

Rey laughs, thinking about that moment in the Falcon, so long ago. “I thought he was very handsome, but no. It was a war, Leia. We never even thought of such things. Not until it was long over.” 

Her granddaughter was innocent in a way people her age had never been—she had never grown up under the shadow of the Empire or the First Order. She had only known the love of a big family and the peace of farming on Yavin. It was what her grandparents had fought for, after all.

“But when did you fall in _love_ with him?” Leia asks, her eyes big as she twists some of the wildflowers into her hair.

Rey allows herself to wade into the depths of her memory. It had taken years of meditation for her to learn to live for things other than those memories; in that painful but pleasurable ache of remembering what it was like to have him beside her. Their daughter Shara had only been ten when the people from the village came to tell her Poe’s x-wing had crashed in the forest—a freak accident no one could have predicted. The years after had been a blur. She had pushed the pain down, tried her best to keep living. She had a child to look out for. And a Jedi legacy to protect. It had to be done.

“It was slow at first,” Rey said, smiling as she closed her eyes. “I lived with him here in this very house, which his parents had built. It was after the war. But during the war we had fought constantly. We were both passionate people and sometimes we took it out on each other.” Her eyes softened. “But after the war it was different. He was farming and I was training padawans. It was so quiet in those first few months, and we both had all this leftover energy and determination coursing through our blood—and we didn’t quite know what to do with it.”

“So what _did_ you do with it?”

Rey smiled down at Leia. “Well, one evening your grandfather came in from the koyo fields and I came back from the temple. We sat down to eat dinner, and halfway through his bowl of soup he looked up and smiled at me. And I just knew. I knew what to do. I had given my whole life to war, and I thought maybe I should give the rest of it to love. And so I told him.”

“What did he say?”

“Turned out he had loved me for far longer than I ever would have guessed.” Rey said, beaming as she looked out fondly across the fields. The sun had almost completely set.

“That’s beautiful, grandmother. I wish I could have met him,” Leia says, yawning, and Rey knows its nearly time for her little granddaughter to go to bed.

“I do too, sunshine,” Rey says, and Leia quirks a tiny eyebrow up at her.

“You’ve never called me that before,” Leia says.

Rey looks down at her, tears welling in her eyes. “I know, sweetheart. I know.”

***

Leia is now tucked in under her quilt, tired and worn out from a long day of playing in the sun. She loves her room because its at the front of the house with a little window by her bed. She can see her grandmother sitting out on the porch late into the night, and she can see the stars. Leia knows she belongs in the stars. She does not know why she knows this, but she does.

Leia is falling into a dream as she stares out the window at her grandmother, and she thinks she’s imagining things. Perhaps she has already begun dreaming.

_What’s that?_ _In the distance?_ Leia thinks as her little eyes close. _Such a ghostly glow…_

***

How very old she is, Rey thinks, laughing to herself. And how very lucky. To live in peace. To live with her family. To have spent fifteen years of her life with a wonderful man who she adored, and who adored her in return. When she was Leia’s age, on Jakku, she couldn’t have pictured any of it.

She is content with her life, with what she’s done. She has won a war, loved her family and friends with all her heart, and passed on the Jedi tradition to a new generation. She will leave this world a better place than she found it.

But being sensitive to the ways of the force can be a curse sometimes. She knows how close she is. Very close. She can feel it. She is looking out at the stars and trying to be at peace with it, but a small, ancient part of her is as scared as anyone would be, and—

“Sunshine. _”_

Rey sees him then, kneeling down beside her, a soft glow in the night. Still young and dashing in his flight suit. He smiles at her, his eyes warm and crinkling at the corners, and Rey feels her breath stop in her throat.

“Poe?” she says, and chokes out a frantic sob. “Poe, I’ve…I’ve missed you so—I’ve—”

“I know, sweetheart,” he says, soothing her. “I know. I’ve been with you. My love has been with you. And Shara. And the grandkids. I’ve never left your side, Rey.”

She cannot find the words, and he understands. He strokes his thumb across her knuckles in the way he always used to when she was upset, an everyday comfort that she had come to miss so much. She had done it to herself in those early years after he passed, but it was never the same, and the sensation had always brought her to tears.

“I’m so _proud_ of you, sunshine,” he says. “I’ve spent every day of the last forty years being proud. Watching you raise Shara into the fantastic woman she is. Wishing there was a way I could let you know how much I loved you. That none of that love went away. That it was always here with you,” he says, brushing a hand across Rey’s cheek. “Always.”

“I know,” Rey says. “I always knew.” She runs a wrinkled hand through his hair and smiles through the tears. “But oh, how I’ve missed you, Poe Dameron. I missed you so much.”

There is a silence, and then Poe looks at her. “Do you know why I’m here?”

Rey sighs. “Yes."

“You always did know these things,” Poe says. “Are you scared?”

Rey lets out a sob. “I don’t want to go alone.”

Poe holds her in his arms, this tiny, strong woman who had to grow old without him, and takes her hand in his. “I’m coming with you, sunshine,” he says. “Is that alright? I won’t be too difficult when we’re one with the force, will I?”

Rey lets out a combination of a laugh and a sob. “Shut up.”

“Good,” Poe says, and helps her to her feet. Rey is a little embarrassed to be standing next to him, old and wrinkled while he’s still the dashing pilot from all her most treasured memories. But he just stares at her, a warm light in the dark. Sunshine. 

He looks at her as adoringly as he always did, right from the very first day she extended her hand to him.

Rey feels something then, like a lurch in her stomach, and suddenly she feels liberated, spread out across the sky and stars, one with everything at once.

And Poe is still holding her hand.


End file.
